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Serbia Serb Serbian education history medieval era
Serbian Education: History--Medieval Era
Figure 1.--Here is a scene of a monastery school where children are being taught to read. These were probably boys being prepared for the Church. The children do not seem to be listening. I think this perhaps is more of a reflection of still limited artistic skill than the skill of the teacher. We are not sure where this fresco comes from or the date. We would guess some time around the 11th or 12 centuries. The open book shows they were being taught Greek. Notethe cap one of the boys is wearing. The blank areas are lost sections of the fresco. The letters on the children's primers are just that. The children were learning the alphabet and they were the letters. Just letters not words. Source: Serbian Education Museum.
The first schools we know as in other countries after the fall of the Roman Empire were schools at courts for noble children, usially just the boys. The teachers were often clergy which were the mst likely to be literate. They might include secular people as well. The first schools for Serbian children other than the nobility as in many other European countries are associated with the Christian church. This occurred relatively late in the medieval era. The Serbs were Christainized centuriss after Western Europe (9th cemtury AD). This was also the time that the Serbs were developing the Slavic language in the form of Cyrillic. We begin to see momastaries in Serbia, many in Kosovo (12th century). The monastaries were rare centers of learmning and literacy This was about the time that the independent Serbian kingdom was established. Serbia began to form around the medieval kingdom of Raska (12th century), The Serbs emraced Orthodoxy which has since been the country's dominant church. The appearances of momastaries is important in any study of educarion because the first schools were located in these monasteries. Af first it was informal instruction and gradually took on the formal characteristivs of a school. Here we hgave a contemorary depictiin of one of rhese scgiils (figure 1). Some of these monastic school survived into modern times. [Karadžić] The Catholic church founded colleges in Vojvodina (Titel and Bac). Education as it developed during the medieval era was primarily associated with the dominant Orthodox Church. Here the Monasteries (Sopocani, Studenica, and Pec). Only a small minority of children woul have received any formal education. The Church's primary interest in education during the medieval era was in training the clergy. We are not yet sure just how much this had changed during the later medieval period.
